Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)
NATIONAL THEATRE
1 FEBRUARY 2005
Q120 Mr Doran: I can understand that.
But if you look at the rest of the world that we live in we have
cut-price airlines, cut-price everything—and we are talking
about theatre that is operating in the commercial market when
we look at the West End. We were given a list of lowest and highest
ticket prices in the West End and the highest lowest-ticket-price
seems to be the Dominion: £42.10, which is three times your
cheapest price of around about £13. I know the Dominion concentrates
mainly on very expensive musicals, so I can understand why their
prices would be higher as a commercial theatre, but that does
not operate as an incentive. A family going to see a show at the
Dominion would have to take out a second mortgage, practically.
We are hearing complaints about theatres not attracting the right
size of audiences, there are empty seats going begging, and nobody
seems to have the commercial nous to attack that in the way that
you have.
Mr Hytner: We do start with the
advantage of subsidy.
Mr Starr: The other thing we have
is that we can make totally our own decisions. We are producers
and theatre owners together—the West End is a much, much
more complicated picture, as no doubt our colleagues behind us
will tell you in due course—so we could make one coherent
decision, talk to the Arts Council about it, talk to Travelex
and our board about it and launch and do it and take the risk.
It has paid off. We used the subsidy to underwrite the risk, then
we did not actually need to call on the subsidy. But trying to
put that kind of corporate position together in the West End would
be enormously difficult.
Q121 Mr Doran: You have not said anything
in your submission to us about your outreach work and community
work. You have mentioned the Connections week that you have. Certainly,
when we visited the National a few years ago, that was presented
to us as a very important part of your work. I would be interested
to hear a little of how that is progressing and how important
it is to you.
Mr Hytner: It remains extremely
important. Connections is one of the most visible parts of it.
Our education department is one of our most active and vigorous
departments. We spend £3 million on it. That work spreads
over a wide variety of activities. Obviously, one of the things
they do is to work with schools on the shows that are being presented
in our main houses, on study days, workshop days, to make those
shows accessible and understandable to schools. But they also
go out into schools. Only last week I was at a school in Elephant
and Castle watching a show that had been written specifically
for a schools' tour by our education department and it was a terrific
experience: a play about three young lads in a detention centre,
written by Roy Williams, who is one of the most exciting of the
young generation of playwrights, being played to 300 girls, adolescent
girls, who started off hysterical and giggly and within five minutes
were completely gripped and were getting a really tough, hard-hitting
story. The education department is also involved in a partnership
with the Albany Empire—following up on a previous question—in
Deptford. We do a lot of it. As you know, these are activities
that have evolved over the last couple of decades. We fund raise
actively and specifically for our education work, but, essentially,
educational activities have been taken on by all performing arts
groups in the years since the core grant was kind of set. It is
something that we have taken on. It is expected of us—I
think we are glad it is expected of us—but it is something
to which we have chosen to divert subsidy.
Q122 Mr Doran: My colleague Michael Fabricant
questioned you on the £250 million which has been estimated
as the bill for bringing up to standard the West End theatres.
Part of your response was there should be some accountability.
Mr Hytner: Yes.
Q123 Mr Doran: Do you see the sort of
work you are doing at the National and outreach and community
work as being part of that accountability for the commercial theatre
if they were given the money?
Mr Hytner: I think there is quite
a lot of educational work that some of the commercial managements
now do. I am sure that if £250 million of public money were
given to the commercial theatres you would be very well equipped
to say what you expected in return.
Mr Doran: A very political answer. Thank
you.
Q124 Chris Bryant: Could we get some
figures on the record. How much subsidy have you received for
this year?
Mr Hytner: £15.8 million.
Q125 Chris Bryant: And next year's? Do
you know?
Mr Hytner: £16 . . . .
Mr Starr: £16.5 million.
Q126 Chris Bryant: There was a bit of
a howl before Christmas, was there not, when the figures were
announced for the Arts Council and lots of people were saying
that museums are getting the money and theatres are not getting
enough over the next few years? Do you think that is fair?
Mr Hytner: We did not expect or
feel we deserved a huge raise. I think we were disappointed that
a commitment was not made to us to keep up with inflation. Cash
standstill—and there is a certain amount of disagreement
about whether it is cash standstill, by the way, and I think the
confusion started when, at the last spending round announcement,
nobody quite knows yet what it is going to be—cash standstill
is effectively a cut. And a cut seems to us to be a mistake. It
is worth saying this: the raises over the last five years, the
commitment by the Government to bring us back up to where we were
before all the cuts of the eighties and nineties did their damage,
has been enormously helpful. Now that we have been brought back
there, I do not think we think we have a particular right to expect
massive raises, but it has been not just the increases in the
last five years but the certainty, the way we have been able to
plan in three-year cycles, that has enabled us to revitalise.
As you probably know, that revitalisation has been even more dramatic
outside of London, in the regions, where £25 million extra
was specifically diverted. I mentioned Birmingham Rep earlier.
The Birmingham Rep story is more dramatic than the National's
success story: 100% rise in audiences at Birmingham Rep, infinitely
more exciting work, directly attributable to the raising of grants.
Our concern is that if we are having now to start cutting back
again to what we were worried about, to be worried from year to
year about whether we are going to be able to match what we did
the year before, we would be approaching the kind of really damaging
situation we had through the late eighties and nineties. That
is our concern.
Q127 Chris Bryant: How much do you pay
the tax man on VAT every year on theatre tickets? Do you know?
Mr Starr: We budget year-on-year
about box office around £12 million or £13 million,
so we pay 17.5% on that.
Q128 Chris Bryant: So I'll have to work
it out. That's fine.
Mr Starr: Until we are culturally
exempt.
Q129 Chris Bryant: I guess that is where
my question was going. Booking fees: quite a lot of people resent
deeply the fact that when you have to buy a theatre ticket in
most of the West End you buy your ticket and then on top of it
there is at least £3 if not £7 or £15 or £25
in addition to pay just for the privilege of getting the ticket
that you thought you were buying anyway. What is the situation
at the National?
Mr Starr: The situation is that,
in West End terms, it is an "inside commission"; that
is, we bear all the costs of staffing and running our box office
and a £10 ticket is charged at £10: that's what it is.
Mr Hytner: There are no booking
fees of any kind.
Q130 Chris Bryant: What do you think
about that booking fee irritation? Because, if you are saying
there is a feeling that there must be something wrong with the
show if suddenly they are selling two tickets for the price of
one, there is another inverted problem about: It is £45,
but. actually, it is not, it is £60.
Mr Hytner: We have the tremendous
advantage, as Nick said earlier, of being in charge of every aspect
of our operation: we are not dependent on ticket sales agencies;
we own our own building; we are entirely in control of our own
box office. How we would cope if elements of our operation were
outsourced, I have no idea, but we have no intention of doing
it.
Q131 Chris Bryant: This is a slightly
more philosophical question, in a way. When we went to the Royal
Shakespeare Company a couple of years ago, Cicely Berry did some
voice exercises with us and she felt quite strongly that acting
has changed, that actors have changed, partly because, in the
last 40 years, much of their income will have come from radio
or television rather than necessarily from the theatre. Do you
think that is true? Is acting changing?
Mr Hytner: Yes, and audiences'
expectations have changed. It is one of our big challenges. Our
flagship auditorium, the Olivier, was I think conceived in an
age where heroic acting was the norm—it was not just the
norm, it was what audiences expected and thrilled to. Over the
years since that auditorium was conceived—conceived for
Laurence Olivier himself, I suspect, centre stage, doing what
Laurence Olivier used to do—audiences have started to expect
acting much more naturalistically, much more naturally, much more
like the acting they see on the television. It is therefore doubly
difficult for actors convincingly to fill the Olivier and to embrace
1,000 people at a time, without the audience thinking, "That's
hammy." It is an interesting challenge and it is a challenge
which many, many actors are well up to, but it is undoubtedly
the case that styles of acting change and what constitutes truthful
evolves from generation to generation.
Q132 Chris Bryant: Has there been an
accompanying change in audiences? Last time I went to the National
there was a woman sitting next to me who talked throughout the
whole production, a running commentary on every single aspect
of the play.
Mr Hytner: I can remember when
I was a kid, when I was visiting London, going to matinees where
all the old ladies talked all the way through. When a show runs
a long time—our current production of The History Boys
by Alan Bennett is now knocking its 200th performance—audiences
start coming who do not come to the theatre that often and then
it is interesting. Those audiences are less accustomed to the
conventions of an evening in the theatre. It is another thing
the actors have to take on board, and they do.
Q133 Chairman: One change, it seems to
me, Mr Hytner, is in deteriorating standards of voice projection,
perhaps because so many actors work such a lot on television.
I went, not long ago, to see your play at the Cottesloe about
the football fans in the pub. I went with a friend and her two
nieces, teenage girls. At the end of it my friend said to them,
"How much of that could you hear?" and one of them said,
"Well, I think 60%."
Mr Hytner: Deteriorating standards
of voice projection? It is a: "Yes, but . . ." If you
were transported back in time and saw the productions you saw
when you were a teenager, my hunch is you would find them stagy,
hammy, over-done. That is why I think modern actors have a problem.
They have this problem too: kids who do not . . . anybody who
does not go to the theatre very often but goes to the movies a
lot, becomes accustomed to highly amplified sound. The movie experience
is to sit back and let it come to you. One of the reasons why
the big, big West End musicals of the eighties were so successful
is because the experience was enormously . . . I am not going
to say "In y'face," but the experience came to you,
you did not have to go to it. The theatre, I think, has always
required a degree of sitting forward, a degree of agreement to
participate, to listen very carefully. I am not here excusing
sloppy diction, sloppy voice projection. You are right, there
is more of it than there was, and the drama schools are now, I
think perfectly understandably, as much concerned with preparing
their students for a life in which most of their living will be
made on television and in films, so there is probably less attention
given to the kind of voice work that we need at the National than
there was. But I think audiences have also changed. To ask an
audience to work a bit is a tougher ask than it used to be.
Q134 Mr Hawkins: I was lucky enough,
with a number of colleagues from both parts of the House but not
on this Committee, to have a back-stage tour of the National last
year during the time you were doing His Dark Materials,
and I was very impressed with what was being done to attract new
audiences, particularly youngsters. And in your evidence you have
stressed the high proportion of your audience that are, as it
were, first-time theatregoers. One of the issues which interests
me is this: given all the good work that is done with theatre
and education—you have mentioned the Shell Connections thing
and all the work that your education department does—is
there a danger that we somehow lose the children who have become
interested in drama through their schools, when they become young
adults, or is the National able to say that a lot of your new
audiences actually come in from young adults and do an age breakdown
to analyse that at all?
Mr Hytner: We work hard at the
young adults. We do think we are doing pretty well. We have all
the appropriate price concessions for students, and, obviously,
school kids, through or education department, come in really quite
reasonably. For our education groups I think all tickets cost
£8.
Mr Starr: £9.
Mr Hytner: That £9, though,
for a lot of kids, is a tough ask, and we have been in conversations
with the DFES about whether some help could be coming from there
as well. Keeping them when they are young adults, funnily enough,
is less of a problem, I think, than keeping them when they are
a little bit older than young adults and they have kids and need
babysitters—the whole family issue. That is a tougher nut
to crack. But I think it is probably the same in all branches
of the entertainment business.
Q135 Mr Hawkins: Thank you. In a lot
of the evidence that has been given to us as a Committee, comparisons
have been made between what happens in terms of theatre and what
happens in terms of sport, especially football. One of the differences,
of course, is that theatre does not have any kind of lucrative
broadcasting deal. Has any thought been given to the idea of all
your shows perhaps being able to be broadcast at the end of their
run? Or is there a rights issue? Or is there simply no appetite
for it, other than for the most controversial of things that have
achieved, as it were, a wider notoriety than most productions?
Is there any thought as to how the National might bring in more
income from broadcasting deals?
Mr Hytner: It is a constant conversation.
I think most of the time it appears that cost outweighs the commercial
benefit.
Mr Starr: I think it is worth
saying that it probably bifurcates into two groups. There is the
group of things which actually take, effectively take, public
subsidy to put on the television. For instance, Kwame Kwei-Armah's
play, Elmina's Kitchen, at the end of its run, we gave
its cassette out to the BBC and BBC4 filmed it—which is
terrific; they actually get rather a large audience, in their
terms. Once in a while, there is an Amadeus or a George
III—probably every 10 years—which truly becomes
a commercial proposition and truly earns the theatre money—and,
in the case of Amadeus, on a long-term basis. But really
that group is a very small group which achieves a kind of commercial
lift-off.
Q136 Ms Shipley: One of the very great
things about the National, apart from its wonderful buildings—Denys
Lasdun, yes?
Mr Hytner: Yes, it is.
Q137 Ms Shipley: I like its concrete
and its form because it allows you to do what you have clearly
done. When you say the life of the National Theatre buildings,
I take it to mean the three theatres, all the foyer space, the
exhibition space, the cafés, the bits outside, the bits
on the roof, everything. When I go to the National Theatre it
is not actually to go to the theatre any more. It used to be,
but now it is to go to the bits of space and the stuff that is
going on in them. I think that is tremendous, absolutely fantastic.
It should be replicated across the country and, sadly, is not.
I said in the evidence here the other week that the regional theatres
do not come anywhere close. My experience of going to most theatres
is crowded foyers; maybe I go and have a drink, maybe I do not
bother because it is so crowded. The production might be nice;
it might not—but let's say it is. I come out, queue to go
to the loo—which is one thing you have not sorted out enough
yet at the National, but never mind, if you are a woman—crush
to get to the bar—there is probably a warm glass of white
wine that has been put on order for you sitting somewhere—the
second half of the production and then you go home. At the National
Theatre you have the foyer events; you have the exhibitions that
are going on; in my case, you end up picnicking with a load of
children in the corner and nobody turfs you out. It's lovely.
There is all sorts of stuff going on and all sorts of people coming
and going in what feels like a very safe environment. Now, that
model, I want to know, is it self-financing, the theatre bits
apart? All the other stuff that is going on, is it self-financing
through the bars and the cafés? Is it that you have to
finance that space anyway, so why not make use of it? Or does
it cost you quite a lot to do that?
Mr Hytner: The activities do all
cost quite a lot. Do we know the degree to which the activities
bring people into spend money in the bars and the coffee bars?
I do not think we know that. We spend a lot on animating the foyers,
and our outdoor street festival in the summer, which is part sponsored
by Bloomberg, does cost a lot, but that is money which we really
feel we have to and want to spend, and we are about to spend a
great deal more on improving and animating the exterior of the
building which has been something of a bug-bear of mine. We are
also, I am glad to say, about to spend £1 million on re-doing
the ladies' lavatories.
Q138 Ms Shipley: It is not a joke, though—
Mr Hytner: No, absolutely.
Q139 Ms Shipley: —because if you
miss out on a lot of the theatre experience because you are queuing,
that is miserable.
Mr Hytner: Absolutely not.
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